Some of that cash began to flow Thursday when the NFL and ESPN announced an eight-year rights extension to the sports network's current license to televise Monday Night Football and produce related programming through 2021. The new deal will pay the NFL about $1.9 billion per year, a 63 percent increase over the value of its current deal, according to the Sports Business Journal.

Covington & Burling corporate partner Douglas Gibson and tax partner Jeremy Spector advised the NFL on the deal. The firm has long served as outside counsel to the league—partner Gregg Levy helped steer the NFL through litigation-related aspects of the lockout—and has strong ties to current and former league officials. Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue currently serves as senior of counsel at the firm, although he no longer works on NFL issues. NFL general counsel Jeffrey Pash is also a former Covington partner.

Gibson, who declined to comment on his role representing the league, was part of a Covington team that advised Turner Broadcasting last year on a 14-year, $10.8 billion television contract with the NCAA to broadcast its annual March Madness men's basketball tournament.

ESPN handled the contract extension negotiations with the NFL entirely in-house through deputy general counsel Diane Morse and assistant general counsel Lisa Stancati. David Pahl serves as the sports network's general counsel.

The deal with the NFL includes more broadband rights for ESPN's Web site and mobile platforms, as well as international rights and the option to broadcast a future wild-card playoff game, according to ESPN.com. The deal also allows ESPN to broadcast more game highlights and develop studio shows based on those highlights.

Not included in the latest deal: the right for ESPN or its parent company ABC to join the rotation of networks that broadcast the Super Bowl. The path toward that game began Thursday night with the defending champion Green Bay Packers beating the New Orleans Saints 42-34.

—Richard Pound, a former vice president of the International Olympic Committee and current tax partner at Stikeman Elliott in Montreal, had some strong words for the Canadian legal profession in an op-ed published in the Vancouver Sun. Responding to a keynote address by David Johnston, governor general of Canada, at the Canadian Bar Association's recent annual meeting in Halifax, Pound called Johnston's remarks a "wake-up call" for the profession, suggested that "recent excesses" within the trade had "disrupted lives and the economy," and wondered "whether and where [Canada's] legal profession had failed to act with commensurate responsibility."